


Unarchived Recordings

by DeliciousBiscuit



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Canon-Typical Horror, Fire, Gen, Isolation, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Season/Series 04 Spoilers, background jon/martin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24171640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeliciousBiscuit/pseuds/DeliciousBiscuit
Summary: Further statements recorded at the Magnus Institute(or I had ideas for stories that would work as Magnus Archives statements and decided to share them with the internet)#1 - Statement of Amelia Lewis regarding her apparent inability to be seen. (set somewhere in the middle of Season 4)#2 - Statement of Joanna Barnes regarding a wooden frog statue found in her attic. (set in Season 1 after Colony)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	1. Sight Unseen

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Anxiety, isolation. This first statement is based around The Lonely, so expect all the usual awful that goes with that.

[CLICK]

Statement of Amelia Lewis, regarding her apparent inability to be seen. Original statement given 17th August 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

You’ve probably come across this question yourself before, either been asked it or maybe you’ve seen it being asked somewhere. If you could have any superpowers, which superpowers would you have? There’s always loads of people who’d say flight, or super strength - an army of wannabe Supermen or Captain Americas. Maybe telekinesis or telepathy from the ones who watched too many X-Men cartoons but have grown out of their phase of sticking pens between their knuckles and pretending they’re Wolverine. There’s always that one smart arse who says “Wealth, because that’s Batman’s superpower.”. Me, I’d always pick invisibility. I’d always think of all the things that I could do if I had the power to make myself invisible, the places I could go and nobody would be able to stop me because they wouldn’t be able to see me. The simple freedom that I’d have if I could just pass by unnoticed.

I’d conjure up scenes of being the one to sneak into the supervillain’s lair and foil their plans of world domination, sabotaging whatever moon-exploding laser or mind control tower they were constructing. I would be the hero of the hour, suddenly appearing behind the villain in the middle of their cackling monologue about exactly how they were about to take over the world for their own nefarious, badly defined purposes and taking them out before their evil plans could wreak havoc on humanity.

Or sometimes it was a more prosaic fantasy of just avoiding the attention of the English teacher whose homework I hadn’t done for the seventh time, of hiding my blushes whenever the cute girl I had a crush on in secondary school smiled in my direction, of dodging the school bullies who wouldn’t be able to torment me for their own amusement if they couldn’t see that I was there.

But even as an adult, invisibility always seemed tempting. Like everything would be just that little bit easier if I just blended into the background and slipped by unnoticed. No judgement for being an awkward mess, no worries about making a fool of myself in front of strangers.

So I tried to actually work out how to do it. How to make myself invisible.

Now, obviously, I don’t mean your actual Fantastic Four Invisible Woman invisibility. That’s not possible. But there are plenty of more mundane ways of passing by without people noticing you. I changed how I walked sometimes, shifted my weight and my balance so my feet rolled from heel to toe when I stepped so they made less sound. I’d try playing around with body language if I was just out and about by myself, working out how to carry myself so I didn’t take up space and how to act with a carefully neutral expression on my face - blank but not so blank as to look like the lights weren’t on and thus that something was wrong. Somebody asked me if I was okay once when I was trying that out and I had to brush it off as just “being miles away”.

It was a fun little game to me, my own private joke that maybe I could be the superhero or secret agent I’d always wanted to be. Just a way to keep myself amused if I was out for a walk by myself or on public transport.

I played my little game a lot more after university when I moved to London. Commutes are boring after all, and the endless parade of strangers you see become much more interesting if you make them into part of a game. Maybe one of them is the henchman working for the villain and out to catch an unwary hero, or the enemy agent that you’re trying to sneak the blueprints past. I’d see how many people noticed me, whether anybody made eye contact or smiled at me or otherwise indicated that they’d spotted me amongst the crowd and I would try to avoid their notice by walking quietly and making myself blend in, while in my head probably humming something daft like the Mission Impossible theme or the soundtrack from whichever comicbook film I’d seen most recently. I didn’t usually get many people showing that they’d noticed me. The comments I’d hear back home of how folk in the south are nowhere near as friendly and Londoners doubly so do have something of a grain of truth. Though I suspect the actual truth is that nobody wants to spend the energy on trying to engage with that many total strangers on a daily basis and everybody is just trying not to think too much about the people who are pressed uncomfortably close to you, 

It sounds childish, and I suppose it is. But I enjoyed it. And I’d arrive at work in the morning feeling like I’d already achieved one victory for the day, which is no bad thing when it comes to tackling the Monday morning blues and waiting for the second coffee to kick in.

I should point out I didn’t always try to not be noticed. I’m naturally fairly introverted and quiet, true, but I did try to make friends with colleagues or people I met outside of work on the rare occasions I’d go out of an evening. That said I did develop a bit of a reputation in the office for sneaking up behind people. One of the other engineers at work, Stuart, once nearly jumped out of his skin when I went over to ask him about some aspect of the bridge design we were working on as he just didn’t hear me approaching despite the creaky floorboards our office had. I hadn’t been trying to be quiet, but force of habit I guess.

It was a few months ago when things started becoming a bit less like a fun game. It started off pretty innocuously. The first instance was when I was standing on the station concourse waiting for a platform to be announced for my train home when somebody suddenly walked smack into me. Damn near knocked me over and it bloody hurt. And it wasn’t like the concourse was that packed that somebody bumping into me might have been expected. The guy was really apologetic, probably even embarrassed at his own clumsiness and how badly he’d been paying attention to where he was going. “I am so sorry,” he said “Just didn’t see you.”. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, being bumped into by tall blokes not paying enough attention is something of a hazard when you’re in a crowd and you’re only 5ft 2” and that’s if you stand up straight for a change. So I just shook it off.

A few weeks later, whilst standing in an overcrowded carriage, there was this woman. The train was packed, but not so packed that she needed to stand that close. I was standing by the doors - I usually try to position myself there if I can’t get a seat so I can at least get the benefit of a bit of breathing room when the train doors open at the stops along the way. It had been a long day and I was tired, so I had my eyes closed. Suddenly I can feel someone standing so close to me that they’d be standing on my feet if they were any closer. I opened my eyes and saw this woman standing with her back to me. I shifted my feet ever so slightly, to see if that served as enough of a reminder that there was another person in the corner behind her but she didn’t notice. For the rest of the journey she seemed to keep inching closer to me, almost leaning against me at one point like I was just part of the train carriage. But I didn’t say anything to her. What could I have said? “Sorry, can you go stand in a different bit of the train where you’ll be in someone else’s personal space.”?

A week after that I was out for a walk when somebody else walked into me, just like the man in the station had. This guy was less apologetic but it was otherwise pretty much the same scenario. “Sorry love, didn’t see you there.”. I was a bit more pissed off this time, as there was even less of a reason why it would be even slightly reasonable for someone to bump into me in the middle of a park.

There were a few more incidents like these over the following week, and after being almost shoved into a wall by someone with only a mumbled apology and something that sounded a bit like “didn’t see you there” I decided I’d had enough. So I tried to reverse engineer the things I’d been doing with my little invisibility game.

I stood up a bit straighter and a bit broader. I let my footsteps go from lightweight and silent to a bold and confident stride. I wore my emotions openly and didn’t even try to conceal my frustration and anger at even the slightest hint that somebody might be about to get in my way.

Except that’s not what happened.

Every time I tried to stand up a little straighter I just felt like there was an impossibly heavy weight being placed on my shoulders and I found myself hunching in a little more. Whenever I tried to walk boldly, my traitorous feet still landed soft and catlike, barely making a sound. And it seemed like every day I would hear the words, repeated over and over again to the point where they seemed to follow me around. Sorry, I didn’t see you there.

I’d try and deliberately catch people’s eyes in public, see if I get somebody to just make eye contact with me. But nobody did. One day I tried almost stomping through the rush hour crowds, forcing my feet down like I was squashing an ant colony with every step. I didn’t care that I probably looked like an idiot, or like I’d gone mad. At least if someone commented on what I was doing that would have meant that they noticed. My feet made barely a sound.

Even at work I was starting to be seen less and less. I startled Stuart just by speaking during a meeting, one that he’d invited me to. It was like he’d forgotten that I had even been in the room.

I even changed how I dressed, or at least I tried to. I tend to wear muted colours, a lot of greys or browns or greens, but one weekend I went out and bought some bright, almost garish, shirts to see what that did. Normally I’d never have even considered wearing something that loud, but I figured it was worth a try. That Sunday evening I laid out my work clothes for the next day and chose the bright red shirt. In the morning when I put it on I hated how it looked, how not me it was. But that was the point, so out the door I went. It was when I got to the train when I realised that my shirt had changed to a soft faded green. I all but yelped with surprise and shock. Nobody seemed to notice my sudden panic over my shirt colour. And when I got home the red shirt was folded up neatly where I’d laid it out the night before, as if I’d just forgotten to pick it up.

The worst was about a week ago. I was on my way home, feeling the weight on my shoulders as I tried to stand tall and the ache in my legs as I forced myself not to tiptoe. I’d given up on the shirt idea, after the fourth or fifth attempt at wearing something bright and eyecatching only to find it replaced with drab and muted colours it seemed like a pointless exercise, and I’d never really liked the bright colours anyway. The ticket barrier at the station wasn’t accepting my Oyster card, maybe I’d forgotten to scan it properly when I boarded or there might have been an issue with the reader? It’s a fairly common issue though so I went up to one of the TfL staff to say my card wasn’t working and ask if they could let me through the gate. The man standing by the ticket barrier was staring off into the middle distance, absently watching the ebb and flow of people through his station and boredly waiting for somebody to ask him for something.

“Excuse me.” I said. He didn’t react. I cleared my throat and tried again, louder. Still nothing. I raised my voice again, almost to a shout, but still nothing happened. He just carried on watching over my shoulder, like he was looking through me. I started to panic a bit. I tried waving a hand in front of his face, which rewarded me with nothing more substantial than a blink and a brief shake of the head. I tapped him on the shoulder, shouted, swore at him, shook him at one point. Nothing. In the end I gave up, just tailgated somebody out instead. I doubt anybody saw. Certainly nobody said anything.

I haven’t been back into work since then. I didn’t even bother calling in to pretend I was sick, because I wanted to see if they would call me to ask why I wasn’t there. Not a single phone call. I’ve spent a lot of the last week in public places trying to see if I can get anyone to notice me, but it’s like...it’s like I really have turned invisible. I’ve been out in train stations trying to ask about when the next train to the first place I can think of is, I’ve been out in the city centre trying to ask people for directions to places I’ve got no intention of going to but that fit the part of being a lost tourist or some other vaguely believable lie. I’ve tried something as simple as trying to get a coffee but I can’t even manage to get the attention of anyone in a cafe without shouting at the top of my lungs. I have yelled and screamed and cried and barely anyone has reacted. I’m almost not sure if I’m afraid any more to be quite honest, mostly I’m just exhausted.

When I haven’t been out in public getting increasingly desperate to make someone react to me, I’ve been looking for anything else that might be able to help me. That’s how I found out about this place, the Magnus Institute. You take statements from people who’ve had strange, paranormal things happen to them, right? I reckon this, whatever this is that’s happening to me, probably qualifies as paranormal. If it does, I hope there’s something you can do to help me. Even getting in here was difficult, I had to all but scream at the receptionist on the way in. They heard me, just about, but still fiddled with their glasses and asked me if I could speak up.

I don’t know what to do any more. Is there anything you can do here that might help me? Probably not now that I think about it. But all I ask is that you see me. 

Can you see me? 

Statement ends.

Another victim of The Lonely, it seems. I wonder if Ms Lewis knows how apt a choice she made in coming to the Magnus Institute and giving a statement asking to be Seen. 

This statement was left on my desk, I’m not sure who by. Maybe Basira left it out for me so I’d have something to keep me occupied, like leaving out food for a semi-feral cat so it doesn’t bring home half eaten mouse corpses for the doorstep. I doubt Melanie left it out for me, she still avoids me as much as she can and I can’t say I blame her.

Maybe it was Martin? If so I don’t know what message he’s trying to send to me by leaving out a statement related to The Lonely for me to find. Does it mean he’s trying to reach out so he doesn’t end up like the poor woman in the statement, that he’s in trouble and this is his way of asking for help without arousing suspicion from Peter Lukas? Or does it mean that he’s fine, that he’s still a long way from being as completely and utterly consumed by the insidious fog of The Lonely as Ms Lewis? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.

There’s also always the possibility that Lukas himself left out this statement for me, as his way of gloating, of reminding me that this kind of awful fading away is the fate that’s waiting for Martin the longer he carries on isolating himself away from me and working so much with Lukas.

I’ll see what Basira makes of this, assuming she wasn’t the one who left this statement out for me. I really hope it’s not a cry for help from Martin. I really need him to - . No. No, I can’t just keep fretting over what may or may not be happening to him. I need to trust that he’ll reach out if he does need help, and that if he does he wouldn’t do it in a way that’s as convoluted and cryptic as leaving out a statement that’s at best tangentially related to what’s going on with him. I hope he knows how - I hope he knows what he’s doing.

End recording.

[CLICK]


	2. Totem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Joanna Barnes regarding a wooden frog statue found in her attic. (set in Season 1 after Colony)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: house fires, death by fire, creepy statues found in the attic, frogs.

“Statement of Joanna Barnes regarding a wooden frog statue found in her attic. Original statement given 7th April 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist at the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

I didn’t mean to do it. I thought it was just a bit of a joke. A creepy frog totem found in the attic that became a bit of an injoke that I could take with me as a memento when I moved house. But I think I caused that fire to happen. I think I killed Adam and Chris, and all because I wanted to keep some stupid joke going.

I moved into the house on Maitland Road in 2005. I’d just graduated from uni and didn’t have any particular reason to find somewhere else to move to after university so I ended up moving in with a couple of friends who had graduated the year before me. I’d known Ally and David since my first year, and I figured our quirks and oddities lined up well enough that living with them would be alright. And they had a space in the house as Sophie was moving out to live with her partner so moving in was fairly straightforward.

At the point where I moved in, I already knew about the frog. Ally had found it the year before when they’d been poking around in the attic trying to work out how much storage space there was up there. The way they tell the story is that they’d hoisted themself up into the attic and started moving a few things to the side. There hadn’t been much in the attic, a couple of old boxes of junk that the man who owned the house had left behind, some old curtains. And tucked behind one of the boxes was what can only be described as this mysterious frog totem. It was a length of wood about three feet tall, seven inches in diameter, and somewhat crudely carved and painted to look like a frog. The main body was a bright green, and its eyes were painted with grey irises and rimmed with red. The mouth was a line of red, painted to give the frog a permanent frown. For some inexplicable reason it was carved to have a bell around its neck. The base of it was unevenly painted black, or possibly slightly charred. It was an ugly thing, but its mysterious origins gave it a certain quirky charm.

Sophie had been out that weekend, so Ally and David broke into her bedroom and set the frog up with a makeshift shrine with a candle and a kitchen knife. Ally even got out some of the fake blood they had from doing theatre makeup and put some of it in a bowl and left it in front of the statue. Then they locked the door behind them and waited for Sophie to come home. Apparently she nearly screamed the house down when she walked in on the grotesque scene in her bedroom but she saw the funny side fairly quickly. Ever since then the frog had been something of a fixture in the house, and rapidly gained the status of a meme amongst our friendship circles. It especially came out at any house parties where it was usually found lurking in a corner judging the festivities and receiving occasional tribute, or it would be very quietly moved next to anyone who made the mistake of falling asleep on the sofa to startle them when they woke up.  
They’d asked the landlady about it before claiming it for the house. But none of the previous tenants had brought it with them and abandoned it in the loft, the landlady hadn’t been given it and put it in the loft of our house so she didn’t have it in her own, and the man who actually owned the house didn’t know anything about a frog statue. So it became theirs, and later mine as well.

I had a very similar sense of humour to Ally and David, so when I moved in it didn’t take long before I was involved in some of the frog-based mischief. We’d move it around the house, hide it in various places. Ally used to hide it in David’s bed if they knew his girlfriend was coming over. My preferred spot for hiding it was behind the bathroom door so you’d only see it after you’d already gone into the bathroom and locked the door.

Fairly shortly after I moved in, I woke up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. It was faint, but distinct enough that after I’d noticed it I bolted out of bed in a panic. I checked everywhere - kitchen, living room, every electrical thing in my own bedroom, under the stairs. Anywhere except for Ally and David’s room that I could imagine smoke coming from. I even briefly checked the garden. Nothing. And as the smell didn’t seem to be getting stronger, and the smoke alarms hadn’t gone off, I assumed that maybe one of the neighbours was out for a late night cigarette. I convinced myself that maybe one of the neighbours was out for a late night cigarette. It didn’t smell like cigarette smoke.

The next day I asked Ally and David about it. Neither of them had ever noticed any smoke smells in the night before, but then Ally’s sense of smell wasn’t the strongest as evidenced by that time they effectively tear gassed the house whilst trying to make chilli oil and David was frequently almost worryingly oblivious about things.

We started getting more frog related things appearing in the house, either in the post or dropped on the doorstep by friends who’d heard about the strange totem found in the attic and had decided they were joining in on the joke by pretending to be members of a sinister frog-themed cult. There wasn’t actually a cult. It was just people we knew finding frog-related things in charity shops and semi-anonymously sending them to us. We generally worked out where most of them had come from.

Generally things for us in that house went well. My first job after uni hadn’t been going too well, but I found myself a new job which paid better, didn’t have as long a commute and was all round better for my mental health. I started a relationship that’s been the longest and happiest relationship of my life. Ally and David ended up in similarly happy positions in their lives. Luck? Blessings of the frog, we’d claim, as we continued to hide the totem around the house.

I continued to occasionally wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke, with no discernable origin for the smell or an obvious source. I started trying to keep track of when I woke up to it, in an attempt to find out where it was coming from in case it was something serious that I needed to tell the landlady about.

There were a few house parties. Nothing too raucous, mostly board games and a lot of alcohol of dubious origins. The tale of the frog cult had spread around our friends to such a degree by this point that people began to pretend to pay their respects to the creepy thing, leaving “sacrifices” of a shot of booze near it or asking it for its blessings before a roll of the dice in a board game. The smell of smoke never appeared in the couple of weeks immediately following a house party like that. One New Year’s Eve we hosted one and drew chalk circles around the frog totem in the middle of the living room. There was no smoke in the night until February that year.

Eventually David moved out. Ally and I took in a new housemate, as we couldn’t pay the rent for the whole place between the two of us. We didn’t know Kate very well but a friend of ours had pointed her in our direction as someone who was in the area, looking for a houseshare and would probably get on fairly well with the fact that this was a house full of somewhat weird people.

Kate didn’t quite get the whole frog cult thing, which is fair enough I suppose. A years-long series of pranks involving a creepy wooden statue found in the attic isn’t the sort of thing that appeals to everyone. She did still find it amusing, especially the next time someone left a very large, luminously green cuddly frog on the doorstep and ran away not realising that she’d seen him. We were able to text him a thank you for the latest offering before he’d even got home. Nevertheless, Ally and I stuck to largely keeping the frog related hijinks between ourselves and at no point hid the totem in Kate’s bed. Well, maybe once.

I woke up more frequently that year to the faint smell of burning. Not all the time, but more often. I still couldn’t find a source for it, but I did tell the landlady about it. She had someone come round and check the wiring and up in the loft in case there was an electrical fault in the house somewhere but nothing came up.

Kate moved out. Ally had a better paid job by this point, and I’d had a decent enough pay rise at my own work so we decided to manage the rent between the two of us for a bit.

Ally told me they were moving out a year later. Their partner lived in Manchester and the two of them were going to move in together. So I started looking for some new housemates. By this point a lot of the people we knew had long since left Birmingham so I was a bit stuck for options and ended up with a couple I didn’t really know moving in. I knew Adam tangentially through shared interests, and when I met him he seemed okay if a bit anxious and socially awkward in the “doesn’t know how to shut up when nervous” way. He told me a couple of horror stories about previous people he lived with, so the anxiety seemed fairly reasonable and so he and his boyfriend moved in about two weeks after Ally left.

Big mistake. We were massively unsuited to living with each other. I could never quite put my finger on exactly how things started going wrong, but for whatever reason Adam and Chris rubbed me up entirely the wrong way and I was the same for them. Initially we got on okay, not brilliantly but we could at least have a bit of a laugh. The frog related nonsense carried on for a bit after they moved in as well, as both of the boys found the joke pretty funny. But very soon the cracks began to appear as we grew to resent each other, and any friendly nonsense began to cease fairly soon after.

Things began to break around the house more often. We’d never had a problem with things breaking beforehand, so I just assumed that the boys were being clumsy, lazy or both. It seemed unlikely that so many things were wearing out at the same time, when there had never been a problem with things breaking constantly before. I woke up a lot that year to the smell of smoke in the dead of night, acrid and stinging. Some nights it was strong enough that it would catch in my throat and make my eyes water, but there was never any sign of an actual fire. I slept a lot less, which probably contributed to how poorly I got on with my housemates.

I stuck it out for one year. I’d been planning to move out anyway and head back north at some point, and the thought of another year living with Adam and Chris sounded like it’d be hell on earth and probably lead to one of us being arrested for murder. The last few months in that house were awful. I guess with my leaving being confirmed there wasn’t a need to pretend to be polite to each other all the time and we could all happily burn our bridges with each other knowing that there was an end in sight. Arguments became a weekly event, if not more frequent. A lot of things broke in those few months as well. There were a few lightbulbs we just gave up on thinking about replacing, and once or twice the circuit breakers for the whole house tripped for what Adam and Chris claimed was no reason. They’d never tripped before in the five years I lived there.

Occasionally we’d manage a regular conversation. It was in one of these that Adam mentioned that he and Chris were intending to take the frog totem with them when they eventually moved on in the future. Well, I wasn’t having that. It didn’t seem fair, it wasn’t their injoke to have after all. It had been in my circle of friends for far longer. And it would be a shame to let something with that kind of personal sentimental value be wasted like that. So when moving day came I loaded the frog totem in the van along with the rest of my belongings and off I drove to my new home back in Newcastle.

I spent one more night in Birmingham after that, when I went back to drop off the van and pick up my car and anything I’d forgotten to pack up. I also spent that day making sure that any areas of the house that I used were damn near spotless so I could definitively say anything else that went wrong there was not my problem. It took ages to get everything clean. It seemed like everything had acquired a layer of grime that left dark grey smears as I tried to clean it off the surfaces. The kitchen was the worst of it, the grime in there was darker, almost a soot-like black. By the time I went to bed I was exhausted and pretty much fell asleep as soon as I hit the mattress.

When I woke up it was still dark out. The air smelled so strongly of burning that I was convinced there must be an actual fire this time. If I breathed in through my nose it was so bitter and acrid that it caught in the back of my throat and made me gag, if I breathed in through my mouth all I could taste was charcoal. I couldn’t see any smoke, though my eyes stung and watered like I was sitting next to a fire.

I raced out of my room in a panic. For some reason, I decided that instead of something sensible like calling the fire brigade and alerting my housemates to the fire, I’d try and find the source of the fire first. I couldn’t find one. Nowhere in the house could I see any evidence of a fire, even though the air smelled and tasted like it should be thick with smoke.

I decided to leave there and then rather than trying to go back to sleep. I quietly did a quick sweep over the house, making sure I’d picked up everything and trying to ignore the sourceless and invisible smoke permeating every part of the house. I was in my car and away before the sun rose, my foot barely coming off the accelerator until I’d made it as far as Grantham.

A couple of months later, the place I’d lived in in Birmingham burned down. Apparently the neighbours were surprised when they woke in the morning and saw the blackened shell across the road, as there hadn’t been any indication in the night that there was anything amiss. Adam and Chris both died in the blaze.

I didn’t want them to die. If I’d known what was going to happen I would have left well enough alone, maybe hidden the frog totem back in the loft so they wouldn’t find it but at least it would still be there.

I’ve started smelling smoke here occasionally. I think whatever it is that was being kept at bay has followed me, or maybe the totem. I don’t know. I want to get rid of it, but I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I do.”

“Statement ends.”

“Tim and Sasha have done a bit of digging into this case for me. Certainly the facts that Ms Barnes has presented check out. She did live on Maitland Road in Birmingham between 2005 and 2009 when she moved back to her native Newcastle, and the house she had lived in did burn down in October of that year, a little over two months after she moved out. Newspaper reports from the time also confirm that the fire killed two people - Adam Roberts and Christopher Hobb. 

The obvious explanation in this case is that Ms Barnes had clearly spotted some kind fault that eventually led to the fire, and any connection with the statue found in her attic is simply coincidence and paranoia. That said, Tim did have a look through the records in Artefact Storage and - “

There was a brief knock, and the door to Jon’s office creaked open. Martin leaned in through the open doorway.

“Jon? What are you doing still here?”

“Martin! I was just..er....recording a statement.” Jon tried to recompose himself after being startled by Martin’s sudden entry into the office.

“You- you do know what time it is, right?”

“Not really, why?”

“It’s gone 10pm. I thought the idea was that you were coming in early so you could leave early while there was still daylight, not that you were moving in here as well.” 

“I...must have lost track of time.”

“Well, you should probably go home at some point, get some sleep. N-not that I’m trying to kick you out or anything, and if you’d rather stay overnight then I can find somewhere else to sleep tonight if you wanted to use that room you had set up, the sofa in the breakroom’s pretty comfy a-”

Jon cut Martin’s babbling off. “No, Martin, it’s fine. I - “ Jon yawned. “You’re right, I should go home.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

“End recording.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is based on an actual creepy frog statue found in the attic of somewhere I lived, so I apologise profusely to anybody who knows about and especially anybody who's lived with the actual frog statue for turning it and our frog-based mischief into horror fanfic. Names and locations have all been changed.


End file.
